This invention relates to stacking devices for garments. Specifically, the invention provides a belt system for moving a garment from a sewing workstation and stacking the garments for the next phase of their manufacture.
While the mechanization of the garment industry is over a century old, several operations in garment fabrication are still performed by hand. For example, stacking pants after completion at a sewing workstation is still done by hand. Although this does not involve heavy lifting, manual stacking does require considerable effort, especially after a stack has risen to a height of two or more feet. Over an entire day of stacking, worker fatigue and muscle strain become evident. This can seriously affect overall productivity and contribute to worker absence and increased healthcare costs.
This manual stacking operation has been necessary as no appropriate machines exist that will stack the pants in the proper orientation, for example, with the zipper facing up. Highly sophisticated and expensive robots could probably perform the task, but in the garment industry, these robots are simply not feasible at this time.